Intro

Flipside Crypto, the startup that is bootstrapping MetricsDAO, just announced their $50M Series A funding round at a $350m valuation on 4/19, a huge milestone for one of the major blockchain data projects in the space. Alongside Flipside, MetricsDAO has grown exponentially, starting off from its humble origins as a group chat (as most DAOs tend to do) to a full-fledged organization that is developing its own protocol and governance structure this year. 

We thought it would be a great time to highlight the journey, growth and vision of MetricsDAO from one of the earlier members - Danner, who also is a key contributor at Flipside Crypto, focusing on the community and DAO team. Below is a condensed interview of our discussion. 

Interview

First off - how would you explain the difference in customers between Flipside and MetricsDAO?

Flipside is a substantive managed service provider, providing white-glove support, expertise and oversight to a small number of chosen customers. Programs start at $1M and up. MetricsDAO is a Web3 platform that utilizes a decentralized community to operate - and eventually a series of smart contracts - to enable analytics through smaller grants ($25-$100K) of Tokens.

A partner like Terra/Do Kwon is probably more suited to Flipside right now, while Olympus, a more decentralized partner, has been a great fit for MetricsDAO.

What do you see as the best case future scenario for MetricsDAO? Fully autonomous and decentralized?

In the future, protocols/partners will be able to simply click a “Fund Vault” button and launch a rewards vault for however much they want, with whatever questions they want. This leads to a sort of “wisdom of the crowd” thesis, which will ultimately drive quality and quantity. 

In the meantime though, we have our reverse grant process (link to submit here!)- people fill out how much they would contribute for an inbound grant. We are also augmenting this with an outbound strategy!

So how did you guys get started at first?

It started with the team at Flipside wanting to play in some of these DAO spaces more. We had this incredible community of >10k analysts participating in different things across the platform and were constantly impressed by what community members are pushing out. In addition, we noticed the talent pipelines that were being created - our analysts were being hired by protocols and communities.

That led to the question: what if we took our process and opened it up? What if we took these bounty processes and did them over here and let people impact other processes and aspects of the protocol?

Wow - I mean, it seems like a natural progression with the explosion of DAOs in the past couple of years. What about the team? How did the Avengers assemble here?

“The question that we were asking ourselves was: who is active in the space that we share values with? “

And to be honest, a lot of them ended up being contacts from our personal networks. Coordinating individuals who do not work together led to a whole new set of challenges for creating the right spaces and breathing life into them.

Once we had kind of a team together we had to figure out how to bring them together into an analytics program. We first tried to self-fund some analytics programs to see how it worked. This led to the first deal with OlympusDAO, and then UGP (Uniswap).

So just to clarify again, what kind of role did Flipside have in the beginning?

Extremely supportive. They were bootstrapping the idea and the team, giving us human capital, financial capital, and access to partnerships.

That’s awesome. What were some of the mental models and frameworks after that stage that you encountered?

We had a very precision-based approach to our vision, which is building an analytics content machine and service provider. However at the same time, we started noticing some highly emergent results - some examples would be the Data Curation and Mentor Circle initiatives that came into being on their own and were highly successful. Then the question became: how do we provide the right resources for these types of organic structures?

How much did you know about these potential pitfalls when you started? There must’ve been so many unexpected challenges along the way…

You don’t know what you don’t know - sometimes you look for an answer and you end up finding a new question.

We were balancing our product-centric vision (the reason why everyone’s here) whilst also operating as a makerspace in some way, where people can come and work on things alongside the product-side path. We were also getting fascinating inbound from providers coming to us (Subgrounds, Datawaves, Footprint Analytics, etc.) trying to get more feedback from users.

As for legal entities - holy shit, absolutely nothing I knew about that. How do you have a real world arm around a decentralized organization? For example - subscription costs. How do we pay for Snowflake as an entity? Is a human the entity, do we expense it to the DAO? The answer became clear that it’s definitely the legal entity route. We don’t want to centralize those on a person, it’s more palatable to subsidize to an entity.

Another challenge that you’ll see talked about in our other bootstrapping piece is how to get contributors. It’s a porous space - we get a lot of passionate people who love the vision. But also, augmenting that with a job posting is really helpful. It creates a really clear front door that people can knock on. People are intimidated to get started - they kinda need “permission” to get started even though it's a permissionless world.

OK, so now we have some semblance of governance, some scaffolding and key contributors. How did you actually go about building a community?

We really looked to GJ (sunslinger) who built the Flipside community for help there.

There’s a lot of aspects to community building - you need to create the rooms but also give them a pulse.

Another thing I try to do a lot is embed myself in the community to anchor the rooms and contribute to that pulse. 

It’s like introducing friends and giving them something to talk about at a party. What about the governance side? How did that develop?

Exactly. 

For the governance side, it was just a ton of research. Looking at other places, Flipside’s resources, etc. We also looked at Rabbithole research for different types of governance. Through that, we developed a Phase 1, with some ideas about Phase 2. 

We’re definitely still playing around and trying out new things! Lots of folks are excited that they have a sandbox now to try out novel approaches to governance that’s different from simply “1 token 1 vote”. 

It seems like DAOs have really exploded recently in the past year. What are your thoughts on DAOs historically and what do you think of the future?

Well, if you wanted to create a DAO, there really isn’t much of a guide book, especially when compared to resources for more traditional startups such as YCombinator, TechCrunch, etc. There’s been a lot of amazing experiments over the past 5 years, with an uptick in the past year with coordination structures. 

I see the future for DAOs as focusing on one specific area and being grounded in a shared vision. To get back to that balance of precision vs emergent, we want to focus on X but not discourage Y. If Y is something that powerful then maybe it should be its own entity!

Thanks a lot Danner! Excited for some Cavs-Knicks battles next year.

As always, stay connected with the discord, twitter, website, and mirror for the most up-to-date developments and to engage with the community!

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